Two billion photos are shared daily on Facebook services. Many of these photos are important memories for the people on Facebook and it's our challenge to ensure we can preserve those memories as long as people want us to in a way that's as sustainable and efficient as possible. As the number of photos continued to grow each month, we saw an opportunity to achieve significant efficiencies in how we store and serve this content and decided to run with it. The goal was to make sure your #tbt photos from years past were just as accessible as the latest popular cat meme but took up less storage space and used less power. The older, and thus less popular, photos could be stored with a lower replication factor but only if we were able to keep an additional, highly durable copy somewhere else.

Instead of trying to utilize an existing solution — like massive tape libraries — to fit our use case, we challenged ourselves to revisit the entire stack top to bottom. We're lucky at Facebook — we're empowered to rethink existing systems and create new solutions to technological problems. With the freedom to build an end-to-end system entirely optimized for us, we decided to reimagine the conventional data center building itself, as well as the hardware and software within it. The result was a new storage-based data center built literally from the ground up, with servers that power on as needed, managed by intelligent software that constantly verifies and rebalances data to optimize durability. Two of these cold storage facilities have opened within the past year, as part of our data centers in Prineville, Oregon, and Forest City, North Carolina.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Facebook adds 2 Bn pics every day : their full-stack approach on cold storage operating at 25% the power of conventional storage servers is both fun and fascinating to read.

One of the questions that has perhaps been central to my own research in blockchain technology is: ultimately, what is it even useful for? Why do we need blockchains for anything, what kinds of services should be run on blockchain-like architectures, and why specifically should services be run on blockchains instead of just living on …

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Brilliant essay by Vitalik Buterin, one of Ethereum founding members, about what Blockchain is / is not (for).

And his very interesting and generic definition of what a blockchain is:

A blockchain is a magic computer that anyone can upload programs to and leave the programs to self-execute, where the current and all previous states of every program are always publicly visible, and which carries a very strong cryptoeconomically secured guarantee that programs running on the chain will continue to execute in exactly the way that the blockchain protocol specifies.

Notice that this definition does NOT:

- Use financially-charged terms like “ledger”, “money” or “transactions”, or indeed any terms geared toward a particular use case

- Mention any particular consensus algorithm, or indeed mention anything about the technical properties of how a blockchain works (except for the fact that it’s “cryptoeconomic”, a technical term roughly meaning “it’s decentralized, it uses public key cryptography for authentication, and it uses economic incentives to ensure that it keeps going and doesn’t go back in time or incur any other glitch”)

- Make a restriction to any particular type of state transition function

I do strongly recommend to anybody interested or curious in this field to take the time to (re)read this post in extenso...

Yes , but it's not new 'news' it happened constantly since the 19th century and mechanization and same social effect with 'Revolte des Canuts' Where are the Canuts today? It also increases significantly the number of jobs with IT components

While the unboxing experience was made slightly complicated by how tight the additional sleep pill box was closed, the overall setup is a pure bliss and the product finish is amazing. Sense may be paired with several "sleep pills" that you clip on the pillow and allow to monitor your sleep as well as your spouse's without interferences other than snoring :-)

(The remarkable and fluid phone UI has 2 slight glitches

1/ when setting the alarm tone, it doesn't play in on the Sense (just on your phone) hence making you to guess whether the Sense has or not sound capabilities2/ in Europe, would have appreciated a temperature in degrees Celsius not Fahrenheit)

Mobile payment transactions may not be the standard yet but there are a lot of people who prefer this method simply because of its ease and convenience. Others are simply worried about privacy and security but developers like Facebook know how to make an app secure all the time. Frequent updates and releases make sure the app is always in tip-top shape.

The latest update to Facebook Messenger brings a new feature that allows person-to-person (P2P) mobile payments. The P2P payment on Facebook Messenger only requires a debit card or credit card (Visa or Mastercard) so you can send money right away to a contact. To send an amount, open up a conversation, click on the dollar ($) icon, enter amount when prompted, and then click 'Pay'. Amount will be sent immediately to the other person who will receive the money on his or her own checking account.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Messaging apps are the cornerstone of mobile P2P as evidenced by this Facebook smart move.

The GL-10 Greased Lightning is a ten-engine, battery-powered prototype with a ten-foot wingspan that can change its shape midair to fly either horizontally or vertically. This month, NASA announced it recently took off vertically and, for the first time, successfully rotated its wings to transition from “helicopter” mode to standard “wingborne” flight.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

NASA's GL-10 design is expected to be 4 times more aerodynamically efficient than an multicopter drone

Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson is set to bring "the greatest minds in cryptocurrency" together to discuss bitcoin and the blockchain on his personal private island this May.

Taking place on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands from the 25th to 28th, Branson's event will feature discussions moderated by Hernando De Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, Wall Street Journal senior columnist Michael J Casey and Matthew Bishop, US business editor for The Economist.

Branson has been enthusiastic in his praise for the bitcoin, having previously invested in payment processor BitPay and accepted the digital currency for his space travel enterprise Virgin Galactic.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Looks like Sir @RichardBranson focus is more on blockchain than on bitcoin. Will invitations extend to Ethereum ?

Paul Brody, the head of mobile and internet with IBM, is proposing a system called Adept, which will use three distinct technologies to solve what he sees as both technical and economic issues for the internet of things. The Adept platform is not an official IBM product, but was created by researchers at IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBV). Adept will be released on Github as open-source software. The platform consists of three parts:

1/ Blockchain: As mentioned above, block chain is the distributed transaction processing engine that keeps track of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. The beauty of block chain is that it can be used for many purposes. Basically it’s a technology that allows data to be stored in a variety of different places while tracking the relationship between different parties to that data. So when it comes to the internet of things, Brody envisions it as a way for devices to understand what other devices do and the instructions and permissions different users have around these devices.In practice this can mean tracking relationships between devices, between a user and a device and even between two devices with the consent of a user. This means your smartphone could securely communicate with your door lock or that you could approve someone else to communicate with the door lock. Those relationships would be stored on the locks, your phones and come together as needed to ensure the right people had access to your home without having to go back to the cloud.

2/ Telehash: It’s one thing for devices to use block chain to understand contracts and capabilities, but they also need to communicate it, which is why Adept is using Telehash, a private messaging protocol that was built using JSON to share distributed information. It’s creator Jeremie Miller says at its simplest telehash is a “very simple and secure end-to-end encryption library that any application can build on, with the whole point being that an “end” can be a device, browser, or mobile app.” He added, “Perhaps, you can think of it as a combination of SSL+PGP that is designed for devices and apps to connect with each other and create a secure private mesh?” A new version of the software is expected soon.

3/ BitTorrent: And finally, to move all this data around, especially because not everything has a robust connection to each other — especially if they are using a low data rate connection like Bluetooth or Zigbee, Adept uses file sharing protocol BitTorrent to move data around keeping with the decentralized ethos of Adept.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Detailing IBM's "Device Democracy" position paper, IBM's Adept system looks quite similar to / inspired from Ethereum while clearly evidencing blockchain as a generic piece of infrastructure. Comments in the post are equally worth a read.

Russinovich is sitting in front of several hundred people who spend their days running thousands of computers. He helped build Windows, and he carries one of the most respected titles at the world’s largest software company: Microsoft Technical Fellow. But here, on stage at a conference in Silicon Valley, he’s perched in front of an audience whose relationship with Microsoft is, at best, complicated.

So many Microsoft customers now rely on open source code. That means Microsoft must embrace it too.

The conference is called ChefConf. Chef is a tool that helps tech geeks setup and operate the many machines needed to drive a website, smartphone app, or some other piece of business software. It’s an open source tool, which means it’s typically used alongside other open source software. When Russinovich asks how many in the audience use nothing but Windows to run their machines, one guy raises his hand—one guy out of several hundred. Mostly, they run the open source Linux operating system.

But this is what Russinovich expects. “That’s the reality we live in today,” he says. The tech world has changed in enormous ways. So many companies—so many Microsoft customers—are now relying on open source code. And that means Microsoft must embrace it too. As Russinovich points out, the company now allows Linux on its Azure cloud computing service, a way of renting computers over the internet, and today, Linux is running on at least 20 percent of those computers.

It’s quite a change for Microsoft, so long the bete noir of the open source community. But as Russinovich explains, it’s a necessary change. And given how popular Linux has become, Microsoft could go even further, not only allowing open source software on its cloud services, but actually turning Windows into open source software. “Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software—open versus not-open versus services—has happened,” he says.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Fascinating yet not totally unexpected : internet history litterate people will have noted that such move is rooted in this millenium's early years, with Microsoft's huge effort on XML that encompassed opening the file formats of its then "real" OS (as per Jean-Louis Gassee's analysis), namely Office. Opening Word, Excel and Powerpoint file formats enabled the openOffice movement, as well as Apple's rescue... which would later launch the iWork suite (Keynote, Pages, Numbers) on OSX then iOS.

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